


Dead Hand in Mine

by Dame_Syrup (mary_pseud)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Human Experimentation, Kinkmeme, M/M, Mad Scientist, Medical Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 22:17:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14628162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/Dame_Syrup
Summary: For the kinkmeme prompt: Davros/Jack, snuff (repeatedly)





	Dead Hand in Mine

Davros hated death: hated it as an enemy who had struck at him again and again and again, hurting him, wounding him, but never quite finishing him off. He hated death as he hated all knowledge that was not his, all power that was not his: as he hated every inch of space and time that was not under his complete and utter domination.

So when he acquired a test subject who was apparently immune to death, his experiments took on a note of decidedly personal intensity.

It was not that the subject (a human called Jack Harkness) could not die: if his throat was cut, he would die. But then he would rise. His wounds would heal, blood would reappear in his veins out of nowhere, and no trace could be found of just where that blood was coming from. Shattered bone healed as quickly as a hand opening, stripped muscle flowed back into place under reappearing skin, and if Davros had had any hair and two hands to tear it with he would have been tearing it, most certainly.

How! How could this man die and die and die and yet live again! It made no sense: they killed him while he was sealed away from all possible sources of power, and yet he regenerated. They overloaded his body with energy, burned him, boiled him, seared him with radiation, and he came back. He came back whole, not a scar on him.

Whole. Whole as Davros was not, as he could never be. Davros had not looked into a mirror for centuries: he knew what he would see. Half a man, burnt by fire and time. A face like a closed and paralysed fist, with only his blue-glowing vision implant to give him sight. No legs, and one arm (capped now with a metal robotic hand); the same support chair that let him move and live would later become the basis for the Dalek project, and it looked quite similar: a cone-shaped pillar studded with half-spheres.

This human, this Harkness - he could almost have been a Kaled. Dark hair, pale skin, plus a ready retort for every blow and wound and torture. The lines of his face were - symmetrical. Handsome, even.

Davros found himself positioning his chair closer to the slab where Jack was killed, again and again. He wanted to possess this man, possess his power of regeneration. With it he could make Daleks that could recover from any damage. If he could determine the source of the power that kept healing this man and control it, he could create Daleks that could be stationed in space for thousands of years, or buried for millennia in a planet's crust, waiting for the time to strike.

The death today was a simple one: a rack of poisoned needles that plunged deep into Jack's torso, paralysing heart and lungs in one blow. Davros watched closely; watched the human shudder and then grow limp as the poison took effect. In ultimate frustration, he reached out with his sole metal hand and grasped the human's manacled wrist, pressed sensor-tipped fingers to the pulse to feel it stop…and then start again, as the poison was somehow neutralised.

The hand in Davros' grasp moved, turning and holding. Warm fingers, holding cold metal as though it was the most natural grip in the world.

"Thank you," Jack said, a bit breathily as his lungs reinflated.

"Thank you. Thank you?" Davros' mechanically-aided voice was a flat buzzing rasp, but his bewilderment showed in those last two words.

"It's always easier to come back…with someone holding your hand." Jack turned his head as far as he could in the clamp, and out of the corner of his eye saw the bald head and wizened face of Davros. "Don't you agree?" he added with a wan smile.

Davros paused for a long moment, and then spoke to the Daleks who were running the termination equipment. "The Mrim series next. I will observe." And as the pipettes came down and started to drip corrosive acids onto Jack's pale unmarked flesh, raising blisters that vanished and then reappeared as new drops fell, Davros held Jack's hand, feeling the fingers convulse with pain, and thought.

He thought of the attack that had made him what he was now. His laboratory, struck by enemy atomic shells. Reviving in a medical facility, crippled beyond any hopes of recovery: had anyone touched him? Had anyone held his hand? No, they had not. Instead they placed a poison injector within his reach and invited him to end his own life. He had refused.

He had been - not dead, but away from life, and revived. Sealed in the dusty vaults under Skaro, trapped in cryogenic suspension, set adrift in space: he had lived on. But never, never, had he been touched. Not for reassurance, not for comfort: when he was touched it was either out of medical necessity or to force him, to make him do something he did not want to do.

Nobody had touched him, just to give and receive the simple comfort of touch, until now.

 

* * *

 

The day would come when Jack would be removed from the experimental schedule.

The day would come when Jack's fingers would find the sole unscarred patch of Davros' skin, and brush it lightly, to see it shiver with delight.

The day would come when two immortals (one hideously scarred on the outside, one just as marked on the inside) would recognise their sameness, the jest that the universe had played on them: and would share what pleasure they could, in defiance of that universe.

**Author's Note:**

> Also available in a Russian translation by Kollega: [Рука в моей руке мертва](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10396671)


End file.
